The success of the campaign against tax credit cuts shows that charities can still influence government policy if they get their message right, says Patrick Murray of NPC.
It’s been an extremely tough few years for charities, and charity campaigners may have particularly strong reasons to feel unhappy. Like everyone else working in the sector, the cash available for the projects and programmes will probably be scarcer now than it was some years ago.
Campaigners have felt under legislative attack, too. The Lobbying Act – swiftly renamed The Gagging Act by its opponents – has placed restrictions on when charities can campaign and what they can say. Many in the voluntary sector claim censorship; a review of the Act’s effect is set to be published, before the end of this year.
But campaigners can take some inspiration from an unlikely source. The Spending Review, while not quite as financially crippling as first feared, has outlined major cuts. Yet the headline bit of politics – the Chancellor back-tracking over proposals to cut working tax credits – is something from which charities can learn a great deal. It may not tell us much about the right to campaign, but it certainly tells us something about what works when we do.
No one can know everything that is said behind closed doors in Whitehall, but it’s unlikely the u-turn was forced by sentimentality. The campaign against removing tax credits from working families was powered by a strong collective voice using robust evidence of impact: who would be hit by the change, by how much, and why it mattered. It also focused its lobbying where it mattered: directly at treasury ministers, as well as influential parliamentary backbenchers, and using the media to amplify its message.
It is a political success story. Such an organised, well-evidenced defence of a group’s interests should be a framework for charities as they lobby for their own causes in the tough years ahead.
For one thing, it’s hard to break through. There’s no reason that charities won’t get a fair hearing, but the harsh reality is that the Treasury is lobbied on thousands of causes every year. In the run up to budgets and spending reviews, this is even more pronounced.
The first lesson is to collaborate and speak with one unified voice, as it would be highly unlikely for all the knowledge to be held in any single organisation.
Secondly, if you are going to throw resources into campaigning, it’s imperative that the case is made politically powerful. Reliable impact data is a crucial part of this. Politicians are professionally primed to worry about evidence showing the difference that a shift in government policy will make on the ground with voters.
Charities are faced with a choice. Collaborating on the issues they care about may be easier than it sounds, and it certainly beats scrapping in competition with one another for an increasingly diminishing pot of money.
Patrick Murray is head of policy and external affairs at NPC.
